Comment by alymurray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alymurray | Hacker News Reader

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I knew it was only a matter of time until we got this question. Thanks for asking—it’s important and definitely something we’re concerned about!

We try to prevent abuse through a few measures:

1) The platform is only available to students who are 13+ , and we encourage both students and volunteers to keep their conversations focused on academics. When in a session, students and volunteers only see each other’s first names (which is not a lot to go off of, considering we have users across the country and even some international volunteers).

2) Before volunteers can begin working with students, they have to go through our screening process. Volunteers provide a picture of their photo ID and two references who we contact and ask about their suitability to work with children. A human being reviews all reference forms and runs the name from their ID through the National Sex Offenders Registry.

3) Tutoring sessions on our platform are completed using a whiteboard and text-based chat (no audio and video). We have a chat filter that prevents inadvertent attempts to exchange personal information like phone numbers and emails, and we also block links out to common third-party video conferencing sites like Zoom.

4) Students and volunteers can rate and report each other, and we read through the chat logs of most of the sessions on our platform. Sessions can get flagged for review for tons of different reasons. This is the piece of our process that is least scalable, and we’re still looking for ways to balance quality assurance and safety with scalability.

If you are already keeping the chat logs, maybe you could figure out a way to record the whole session including the whiteboard sessions? Then if you can figure out a way to tag the session’s content appropriately, you would pretty quickly end up with a searchable library of tutoring sessions available on the site (wouldn’t be hard to anonymize them to protect the student and tutor’s privacy). Then you could use the students and volunteers to filter them for quality by making them available in the app / on the site by upvoting etc. That way you would leverage your expensive resource (volunteers) and provide another way for students to benefit if they aren’t in a position to do an interactive tutoring session e.g. on the bus, too noisy at home etc - many low income students have no quiet place at home to do this kind of session because there are just too many people sharing the space.

Getting back to the safety aspect - people are less likely to test the boundaries of your safety rules if they know these (anonymized) sessions will be seen by many other people, and this would massively increase the number of eyeballs for each session further increasing the detection rate of any remaining bad behavior

[Edit - you could also use these recorded sessions to help volunteers get better at teaching, you could get an expert to put together small videos on improving teaching technique with positive and negative anonymized examples from the sessions, then make them available to the volunteer tutors. That could be another low cost and scalable way to reward the tutors - most people who teach would like to get better at it!]

I like your idea about recording the whole session, and it's something I think we should do for numerous reasons, including student safety, volunteer training, and the ability for those recordings to be used for academic research to better understand tutoring. I think depending on the file size it could get quite expensive to store them, but I'll defer to Dave on that!

One thing we probably won't do any time soon is make a library of past sessions available publicly to students. We want to stay firmly in the category of live, personalized support so that we don't overlap with sites like Khan Academy (videos) or Quora/Stack Overflow (asynchronous support).

We do really want to expand our volunteer training and get volunteers to provide feedback to their peers on their sessions though, and I agree the recorded sessions would help a lot with that!

> Tutoring sessions on our platform are completed using a whiteboard and text-based chat (no audio and video).

Have you found that to be sufficient? I recently tried doing some online tutoring, and I found that even with an audio connection, I had a lot of trouble telling if anything I said was landing at all. I came away from the experience rather disillusioned with the idea of trying to do this online at all.

Do you mind me asking what site you tried doing online tutoring for? I'd love to hear more about your experience (both the positives + negatives)!

On our site, students seem to really like the text-based communication because it creates what we call a "judgment-free zone". They have time to think through what they want to say and can end up less embarrassed to admit when they don't understand something.

On the tutor side... yes, it does require the tutors to be particularly engaging and patient. :) Our best tutors try to gauge students' understanding often and ask lots of questions to elicit active participation. Like anything, it just gets easier with practice!

Is this a physical whiteboard or wacom/ipad? Either way this sounds like a really subpar experience of having the teacher write out an equation each time and then return to his keyboard to type the relevant explanation.

What's wrong with just enabling audio?

If I'm understanding your question correctly, it's neither! It's something you'd draw on with your mouse or trackpad on a laptop. We also have other tools you can use to make it easier to tutor math (e.g., ability to add text and shapes to the whiteboard, ability to upload photos of homework, etc.). If you want to see exactly what it looks like, check out this demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SufRUje0XiM

In the future, we actually do plan to add audio to the platform as an optional feature that students can turn on. Most students prefer the text-based communication of our current platform, but there are definitely some who would use audio if given the choice. We still need to think through how to get mutual buy-in from both the student and volunteer in that session as well as whether we want to do additional background screening for volunteers who want to use that feature.

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